Books

Ross Clark, journalist, met Al Gore to interview him about his favourite topic. But Ross broke the rules; he did some research. Clark even talked to a professor about the scenes of Florida being flooded. The prof explained that it’s not so much that the seas were rising fast, but that the land under Miami is sinking — and by an amazing 16-24cm in the last 80 years. (No wonder some residents are seeing water inundate new areas.)

When I put all this to Al Gore and ask him whether his film would be stronger if it acknowledged the complexities of sea level rise — why it is rising in some places and not in others — I am expecting him to bat it away, saying that it doesn’t counter his central point and that there is a limit to what you can put into a film pitched at a mass audience, but his reaction surprises me. As soon as I mention Professor Wdowinski’s name, he counters: ‘Never heard of him — is he a denier?’ Then, as I continue to make the point, he starts to answer before directing it at [...]

The Fairfax press say the improbable Gore-Palmer play was a win for alarmists. The Australian calls it for skeptics and says Gore is a fool. I’m not calling anything until I see the fine print. Palmer says he’s met P.M. Abbott and he was ‘encouraged’ by his climate plan.

The only thing I can say for sure is that the science of CO2 is irrelevant to both Gore and Palmer. Everything else is a paradox. We’re not being told everything.

It seems now that Palmer’s amendments to repealing the carbon tax do not include an Emissions Trading Scheme (even the Fairfax press agrees). That makes it look like a skeptic win, but keeping the $10b Clean Energy Finance Corporation is a win for Gore, and so is keeping the RET (Renewable Energy Target) and the Climate Change Authority — it’s another government funded advertising unit for the carbon scare campaign. The more patrons who are dependent on the carbon-subsidies, the more pro-carbon lobbyists there are. And they lobby like their livelihood depends on it — because they have nothing if the government policies don’t prop up their pretend free market.

This is not what PUP voters thought they were voting for… but the Big-Bankers will be happy.

Really? Clive Palmer holds the balance of p0wer in the new Australian Senate, due to start on July 1. He’s the coal magnate who made it clear he would get rid of the carbon tax. Now he’s palling up with Al Gore, and saying he’ll vote the tax down but only if we add a clause for an emissions trading scheme that is conditional on China, the US, the EU, Japan and Korea joining in too. Is this a meaningless dead-duck promise that is unlikely to happen, or is this the long softening up for the UN convention in Paris next year, when weak schemes (like China’s, where lots of permits are free) are used as leverage to call in the sub-clauses? I don’t think Gore would be flying out here if there was no chance this legislation would matter. At the very least he will use it to lean on other countries, as evidence that “Australia wants in”. At the very least this is about keeping the illusion of momentum going.

What is going on behind the scenes for this extraordinary turn-around? [...]

It’s good to know some people just can’t be bought and Chris Tangey is one of them. He refuses to allow any part of his work to be used to “decieve” people.

Al Gore or someone in his team, really wanted the firestorm footage for his 24 hour televised special coming up this week (which Watts Up is matching hour for hour). One arm of his team (the Office of the Honorable Al Gore) asked Chris Tangey of Alice Springs Film & TV for permission to use the spectacular footage in late September, and Tangey said “No” it would be “deliberately deceptive”, which caused media stories around the world. Now another arm, The Climate Reality Project has quietly tried dressing up in their nonprofit-documentary-group-cloak and again offering money to secure the rights.

The full recent email exchange is below. The Gore team mean “no disrespect” but their representative Andrea Smith was still happy to insult people with names, and was perplexed, writing that ” the US is the only country in the world that has an active Climate Denier movement – every other country in the world has accepted this as a fact.” We can see how well informed Al’s [...]

Chris Tangey captured moving images of a dust storm picking up a bushfire.

He’s turned down some income to stand on his principles.

Al Gore wanted to use the awesome shots of a dust devil picking up a bushfire, which happened on Sept 11, 360km southwest of Alice Springs at Curtin Springs Station. When Al Gores office asked for rights to use the footage, Tangey knocked him back. He felt its use in a climate change setting would be “deliberately deceptive” and that it was “difficult for me to imagine a fire event less relevant”.

“I am aware that you may have missed the reporting on the very localised nature of this firestorm,” Tangey wrote. “However, in any case, I am confused as to why you would offer to buy a licence to use it at all unless you had conducted even elementary research which might indicate that this Mt Conner event had direct linkage to global warming/climate change.”

No one from the big scare campaign is even pretending that this is about the science anymore. It’s just tribal name-calling, voo-doo dolls and poo jokes from preschool.

Al Gore hopes he has reality on his side. But the reality is the relentless slide of the polls. It’s the crashed Chicago Climate Exchange, the kaput green jobs. It’s the long list of countries who are are shaking themselves free of the eco-shackles. The apostles of a bygone cult are reduced to saying that warming causes cooling, death, disease and even prostitution in Ghana. The babbling last players standing are talking about saving the world from aliens. Sadly, those are not the nutters, no, they’re the ones from NASA.

The NASA crew worry that the aliens who have been blind to the last 60 years of I love Lucy beamed out to space, have instead been transfixed by a trace gas composition change from 0.028% to 0.039% on the third rock from the sun in a distant galaxy. I’m scared now, not of the aliens, but of our collapsing collective IQ. This is modern public debate (and from the team that got the man on the moon.)

“When you go and talk to any audience about climate, you hear them washing back at you the same crap over and over and over again,” he continued. “There’s no longer a shared reality on an issue like climate even though the very existence of our civilization is threatened. People have no idea! … It’s no longer acceptable in mixed company, meaning bipartisan company, to use the goddamn word climate. It is not acceptable. They have polluted it to the point where we cannot possibly come to an agreement on it.”

He’s uses all his science degrees to come back with an erudite answer to his critics:

It may be volcanoes.’ Bullshit! ‘It may be sun spots.’ Bullshit! ‘It’s not getting warmer.’ Bullshit!” Gore exclaimed.

Hat Tip Marc Morano: Climate Depot

Hockey Schtick has some fun with it.

Yes, and basically this is an unthreaded thread, where commenters can tell the news.

The public might not understand the science, but they do understand cheating

Dr. David Evans 19 October 2010

[A series of articles reviewing the western climate establishment and the media. The first and second discussed air temperatures, the third was on ocean temperatures, and fourth discussed past temperatures, the fifth compared the alleged cause (human CO2 emissions) with the alleged effect (temperatures), the sixth canvassed the infamous attempt to “fix” that disconnect, the hockey stick, and the seventh pointed out that the Chinese, Russian, and Indian climate establishments (which are financially independent of the western climate establishment) disagree with the western climate establishment about the cause of recent global warming and the eighth showed how government institutional and funding pressures created the consensus among western climate scientists. The ninth showed the evidence that the amplifying feedbacks, responsible for two-thirds of the model warming projections, are not present in reality—and that the lame response of the establishment was to miscolour a graph to mislead us into thinking those feedbacks were [...]

Today, while I work on something else, I thought I’d just share a few of the more entertaining pieces of writing I’ve come across lately.

How many mistakes can you pack in one phrase?

Remember how all defenders of the Man-Made-Catastrophe were trained to say that skeptics are funded by big oil, and Big Oil had that insidious agreement… that internal memo that said they were aiming to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact” (which has all the meaning of “repositioning McDonalds as a fast food chain”, it being tritely obvious and all). Well, Russell Cook points out that this popular bumper-sticker line that’s quoted ad lib across the ether, is full of mistakes, misattributions and misinformation. It seems it’s not only not a smoking gun, but it’s not a weapon, and wasn’t fired by the prize winner shooter they attributed it too, and the guy that didn’t fire the dud shot, didn’t win a prize either.

With fanfare according to Gore it was “discovered by the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Ross Gelbspan”, but the Pulitzer site doesn’t know about Gelbspans “prize”, and you can read all the sordid details at the Climate Gate Country Club, or a [...]

Thanks to Glenn Beck, we get bit more insight into the tangled web that The House of Global Warming was built on.

Who would have thought? Goldman Sachs has been working hard to save the environment for years.

Generation Investment Management (GIM) was founded by Al Gore, and a few friends, which included David Blood (former Goldman executive), Mark Ferguson (Goldman) and Peter Harris (Goldman). They are the fifth largest shareholder in the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). Then in 2006, when the CCX needed some extra funding, who should step up to buy 10% of the company – Goldman Sachs.

CCX is an exchange that won’t be doing a heck of a lot if carbon trading doesn’t become mandatory. All of these players have a vested interest in Cap N Trade legislation.